The Feldman File covers eBooks, publishing, new media, Internet services, consumer electronics and salsa dancing. (Okay, not salsa dancing, but it'll be interesting to see how many people looking for information on salsa dancing end up here.)

Friday, December 31, 2010

According to the Wall Street Journal, Borders announced yesterday that it is delaying payments to some publishers in order to conserve cash, and is trying to restructure payments to those publishers. The company is also trying to refinance its operations, but it says that "there can be no assurance" that it will so do. If it doesn't refinance its existing debt, it will default on some of its lending agreements in Q1 2011, which could lead to "a liquidity shortfall"--in other words, not enough money to fund ongoing operations.

What's even more concerning to some analysts is that Borders is doing this after the end of the Christmas shopping season, when the company's cash reserves should be at their highest level of the year. It indicates that Borders may have significantly missed its sales targets for Christmas. Borders has only shown a profit in two of the last 11 quarters--Q4 2008 and 2009, which included the Christmas selling seasons in those years.

Even if only one of the "Big 6" decides to stop shipments to Borders, it will dramatically impact the company's ability to keep operating. If customers learn that they can't purchase the books they're looking for at Borders, they'll switch to Barnes & Noble or Amazon. I doubt that any publisher wants to see Borders fail, but they also don't want to advance more inventory to Borders on extended credit, only to see it frozen should the company declare bankruptcy.

The clock is ticking, and the next 90 days may be the most important in Borders' history.

According to the WSJ, Okta, the San Francisco-based startup that's the focus of the article, plans to spend 80% of its $10 million Series A round on salaries, most of which will be for developers. Part of the problem is that salaries for developers in the San Francisco Bay Area are dramatically higher than in most other parts of the country; Okta is paying $75,000 for developers just out of school, and up to $150,000 for top developers, while the national median salaries for entry-level developers is $51,000, and $101,000 for experienced, senior-level developers (based on figures from Salary.com).

These costs are driven in part by the cost of living in Silicon Valley, which is higher than anywhere in the U.S. except for portions of New York City. In addition, even though there are far more developers in Silicon Valley than in any other comparable area in the U.S., everyone wants the best developers, and there are only so many of them to go around. That competition inflates the salaries that companies have to pay for talent.

In addition, the decline in IPOs has made candidates skeptical about the value of equity. In the "Dot-Com" years, startups could offer sub-par salaries, even to top talent, so long as they gave them substantial stock options. Today, when the exit strategy for most startups is to be acquired, most of the proceeds go to the angel investors, venture capitalists and founders; very little is left over for employees. So, while startups are very picky as to who they hire, the candidates demand top salaries (and still demand equity as well).

One solution to this logjam is to stay away from Silicon Valley. I've written about this many times before, but moving from almost anywhere else in the U.S. to Silicon Valley will instantly impose an operating cost penalty of 30-50% on your startup. Cities like Austin, Boston, Boulder/Denver, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Portland and Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill have excellent quality of life, strong technology bases, top universities and much lower costs of living than Silicon Valley.

Here's the key: These areas don't need to be "the next Silicon Valley" in order to be successful. They don't have to replicate the entire Silicon Valley infrastructure: Money and resources are now global. The biggest investor in Chicago's Groupon, for example, is Digital Sky Technologies, based in Moscow. Moscow is a long drive from Sand Hill Road.

Having lived in Chicago for two years now after 25 years in Silicon Valley, there's not much that I miss. The weather was much more to my liking, I enjoyed being able to drive to the Coast in an hour, and the seafood was far better. On the other hand, I paid 50% more for a semi-squalid apartment, virtually everything cost much more, and state income taxes were three times higher than those in Illinois. For me at least, it's a reasonable trade off.

So, one solution to the "war" for top talent is to stay out of the battlefield.

Update, 27 December: In response to the DigiTimes article, Logitech issued a very nuanced statement to Barron's, a daily financial newspaper owned by the Wall Street Journal. Logitech said that Google did not ask the company to suspend its shipments of the Revue. It says that it is continuing to ship "products" to its customers (although the statement doesn't name the Revue as one of the products), and that it doesn't comment on specific production plans for any of its products. In other words, Logitech doesn't deny the DigiTimes report, nor does it confirm that it's specifically fulfilling new orders of the Revue to anyone.

With $1,000, you can purchase a decent HD consumer camcorder, or a few lights, or a copy of Final Cut Studio, but not a computer to run it on. None of this is going to move the quality needle very much. Further, these grants are taxable, so the net value is considerably less than $1,000. The real value of the program seems to be to B&H--to get any real improvements, people will have to buy more than $1,000 worth of products, and they have to buy them from B&H. In addition, YouTube has 15,000 Partners, yet only 500 got the grants. That means that more than 96% of YouTube's partners are angry that they didn't get any money.

Google would have gotten a lot more value for its money if, instead of giving $1,000 to 500 partners, it gave $10,000 to 50 partners. With $10,000, you can buy much better camcorders (two Panasonic AG-AF100s, for example), or a complete editing and color-correction system. You can buy much better audio equipment. In fact, if you're careful, you can buy enough hardware and software to dramatically improve the quality of your videos, which is the point of the program.

If I received $1,000 from Google, I wouldn't complain, but this program seems like a waste of money.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

This is a bit off-topic, but if you're a Firefox user, it may be helpful. Like many Firefox users, I've installed many extensions, but since those extensions are essentially separate programs, they bog the browser down. Eventually, I go through and turn off or uninstall all but the essential extensions. However, that doesn't always fix the performance problems.

There's another category of Firefox add-on that most users pay much less attention to--plugins. Media players, such as those for Adobe Flash and Apple Quicktime, are installed into Firefox as plugins, but there are many other applications that silently add plugins to Firefox. You can uninstall an application, but its plugin may be left behind.

To review and clean up your plugins, go to the Tools menu, select Add-ons, and then click on the Plugins icon. Turn off all the plugins for media formats and applications that you no longer use. If you see a plugin that you don't recognize, you can turn it off, and if it causes problems with viewing certain content or running applications, simply turn it back on. Depending on the number of plugins you've got, you may see a significant improvement in Firefox's performance.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

I produced five episodes of the Feldman File videoblog from late October to early December, in part as a challenge to see how much I could do with inexpensive, consumer-grade hardware and software. I put the videoblog on hold after five episodes because viewership dropped below the level where it made sense to continue producing it in its current format. However, I learned a few things that may be helpful to you:

It's perfectly reasonable to use an inexpensive, Flip-style camcorder to shoot a videoblog, and the results are much better than using a webcam. The camcorder I chose was Sanyo's VP-CG102. It's priced about the same as a Flip, but it has a monitor that folds out and turns 180 degrees, so that I can check framing and focus without jury-rigging mirrors.

However, I ran into problems with the Sanyo when I shot some green-screen footage. The footage looked fine by itself, but when I composited it with a background image in iMovie '11, it looked terrible. Noise levels were very high.

iMovie '11 is a great video editor for its price, but there's very little control over "trick features" such as green screen mattes. You get what you get. Rather than move to a more expensive editing package, I did some investigation and purchased FXhome's CompositeLab Pro. It offers much more control over the quality of mattes and only costs $149. (If you're also interested in video effects, take a look at their VisionLab Studio, which combines the green screen compositing of CompositeLab with visual effects and color grading, for $349.)

That improved, but didn't eliminate, the noise problems. The real solution will be to replace the Sanyo with a better camcorder.

Singular Software's DualEyes is a real life-saver. It allows me to record audio on a separate recorder and sync the audio tracks from the recorder and camcorder automatically. Manually syncing the tracks would have taken hours per episode.

If I were starting all over, knowing what I know now, I'd spend the money on a better camcorder. I probably could make do with iMovie '11's green screen capabilities, and could record usable audio directly from the camcorder, eliminating the need for an external audio recorder and DualEyes.

I owned the Adobe applications before I began, so I ended up purchasing Apple's iWork and iLife suites, DualEyes and CompositeLab Pro specifically for this project. There were two other practical lessons that I learned:

There has to be more visual interest than just pictures of products and text slides. The comment that I got most often was "Why can't I see you?". I went to a narration-only format after a few episodes, but viewers like to see people.

I've been doing everything myself, but it's much easier if you have at least one other person helping you.

A cloud-based music service is a good idea, but one that doesn't have a download option or support "out of the chute" for mobile devices? What were they thinking? I keep asking if there's anyone in charge at Sony who knows what they're doing, and the answer always seems to be no. If you want a portable music solution from Sony, you might want to consider purchasing an old Walkman from eBay.

To navigate around and through the remote scene, he's using a Wiimote to move a virtual camera (the actual Kinects stay in fixed locations). The person in the remote location can see the location of the "camera" by donning 3D glasses.

The quality of the video is still somewhat lacking--the resolution of the Kinects is 640 x 480--and there's just so much live streaming data that you can push over a USB 2.0 interface. But, Kreylos did this with two $150 Kinects--everything else either already existed in his lab, or he could get it easily.

Cisco sells telepresence systems that are designed to make you feel that you're in the same room as the other person, at prices of $300,000 a system and up. They have less-expensive systems that are essentially minor variations on teleconferencing systems sold by many companies. If a developer at UC Davis could cobble together a 3D telepresence system using $300 worth of off-the-shelf hardware, how can a business justify $300,000 for a system that does something similar?

We've been waiting for Microsoft's "next great innovation" for years. Surface wasn't it, nor was Zune, and neither will it be Windows Phone 7. It looks like Kinect is the first truly game-changing (no pun intended) innovation from Microsoft in years. So, start thinking about what can be done with HD Kinects using USB 3.0 interfaces. This is the 3D future, folks--not Jeff Katzenberg rolling out endless inane 3D movies, but rather, individuals, businesses, schools and institutions integrating 3D into our everyday lives.

Now, Sezmi is falling back to a package combining broadcast TV, video-on-demand and Web content for $4.99/month. However, in order to use the Sezmi service, subscribers need a high-speed Internet connection and Sezmi's $150 bundle of a broadcast antenna and 1 Terabyte DVR. By comparison, consumers could subscribe to the ivi TV service for $4.99, which only requires a high-speed Internet connection and runs on most personal computers.

I don't think that lack of customer interest was the only, or even the primary, reason why Sezmi dropped its cable package. However, Sezmi now has an additional problem--many customers in its 35 other markets bought the Sezmi system with the expectation that they would eventually get access to the cable channel package. Now that the cable channel option is dead, I expect many users to discontinue the service or demand refunds.

Let's examine that argument. In the U.S., television broadcasters are struggling to recover from the recession. That's a big reason why there's been so much emphasis on payment for retransmission rights by cable, satellite and IPTV service providers; broadcasters are trying to tap into whatever revenue sources they can find. There's not a lot of money in broadcasters' pockets to pay more for syndication rights. But what about DVD sales? According to research firm In-Stat, they're forecasting physical video media sales to decline by $4.6 billion from 2009 to 2014. That's not just a decline in DVD sales--that's a total decline in both DVD and Blu-Ray sales. In other words, Blu-Ray, the technology that was going to save the movie studios, won't. On the other hand, In-Stat is forecasting that video downloads and streaming are going to increase $4 billion, from $2.3 to $6.3 billion, over the same period. Essentially, Bewkes' company has no choice but to sell to Netflix and its competitors, simply to compensate for the decline in DVD and Blu-Ray sales.

Perhaps by bad-mouthing Netflix, Bewkes believes that he's improving his negotiating position or demonstrating what a tough manager he is. The overall impression, however, is that he's out of touch with reality. Given Time Warner's history of mismanagement over the years, that's not reassuring, either to Time Warner's shareholders or employees. It might be a good time for him to decline additional interview requests and get a better handle on what's really going on in his businesses.

Even though the U.S. Commerce Department reported that overall retail sales rose 0.8% in November, consumers were much smarter about their Black Friday purchases this year. Historically, retailers have offered a limited number of low-priced products on Black Friday, expecting customers who find the product they want to be sold out to buy more expensive (and profitable) products. This year, consumers either walked out without buying anything if the bargain they were looking for was sold out, or put so much pressure on store management that they were allowed to purchase more expensive products at the price of the sold-out models.

At the same time, ECN Magazine is reporting that consumers are avoiding 3D and Internet-enabled HDTVs. The article quotes a fund investor who questions the logic of CE companies pushing expensive new 3D HDTVs just a year or two after most people purchased their first big-screen HDTVs. Consumers don't see the value proposition, especially in a still-fragile econony. In addition, consumers are put off by the requirement to purchase expensive 3D glasses for every person who wants to watch. There's also a dearth of 3D content, and consumers are afraid of becoming nauseated or getting headaches if they watch 3D.

In addition, consumers are avoiding Internet-enabled HDTVs if they're priced significantly higher than comparable non-networked devices. They realize that they can add Internet connectivity by purchasing an Apple TV or an Internet-enabled Blu-Ray player (some of which are available for under $100). They're also comparing the prices of those products with Google TV-enabled devices, and are going with the less-expensive products. As with 3D, they don't get Google TV's value proposition and can't justify the higher price.

What does it all mean? 3D HDTV won't really take off until an economical, reliable system that doesn't require glasses is available--which is what the CE industry should have waited for in the first place. As for Google TV, it may already be dead, but it certainly won't take off until the price is $99 or less. Google and its partners had no good reason to rush the products, which were clearly half-baked, into the market so soon. By the time they fix their many problems, consumers will have moved on.

Xcalibur is said to offer a limited, hand-picked selection of websites and video services. It's yet another "walled garden" approach, and it's very likely that you won't find any content on Xcalibur that's competitive with any of Comcast's existing services.

It's true that the other over-the-top video services are also walled gardens to some extent, but with the exception of Apple TV, that's not because they're deliberately closed off. It requires some development work, but anyone can make their video content available on Boxee, Roku or Google TV. In the case of Boxee and Google TV, they want to offer even more web video content but are actively being blocked.

Depending on whether you're a new or current Free customer and how long you've owned your previous Freebox, the cost will be between 60 and 120 Euros (approximately $80 to $160), and monthly triple-play service will be 29.99 Euros/month ($40.14). It offers all of Free's 154 basic video channels at that price, and 213 additional channels on higher tiers.

Comcast, and virtually every other U.S. multichannel video service provider, is driving to the future while staring in the rear-view mirror. A walled garden approach won't fly, but you wouldn't expect anything more from a company whose most exciting recent development is an app that turns an iPad into a remote control.

Amazon's cloud computing capabilities are almost taken for granted now, but it's useful to step back and think about what can be done. You can store and distribute vast quantities of data through AWS. Through EC2, the Elastic Compute Cloud, you can configure as large or as small a CPU processing surface as you need, including clusters. If you're doing numerically intensive processing or even graphic rendering for motion pictures and games, AWS offers GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) clusters based on Nvidia's Tesla GPUs. If you've got a large library of video, audio or HTML content, you can use Amazon's CloudFront CDN (Content Distribution Network) instead of contracting with companies such as Akamai, Limelight and Level 3.

There are many other things you can do--build iOS and Android applications that use AWS services, deploy relational databases, and even run your own DNS servers. Through third-party services built on top of AWS, you can encode and transcode videos. It's all impressive, but what's even more impressive is that you can create, configure and manage all of these services from a notebook computer in your living room. Further, you can get started with many of these services, and even launch small-scale alpha and beta tests, for free.

Even the smallest startup now has access to world-class infrastructure, and the barriers to entry based on infrastructure are almost completely gone. With AWS, Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Javascript, HTML5 and the server programming language of your choice, you've got an incredible set of building blocks, most of which are free or nominally priced.

You've probably heard the term "elevator pitch": It's a very brief description of a product, service or business idea--no more than a few sentences, and no longer than 60 to 90 seconds. The term "elevator pitch" comes from the length of time that you have to pitch someone if you're riding the elevator together. A clear, coherent elevator pitch distills your idea down to its essence. If you can't distill your idea down to an elevator pitch, the conventional wisdom is that it's either too complex or you haven't thought it through sufficiently.

The elevator pitch idea originated in the entertainment industry, where it was called "High Concept". Producers and screenwriters had to reduce their story ideas and scripts down to a few words: "Cars that turn into giant robots!". "Spider-Man as a movie!". "Aliens invade (fill in the blank)!". High Concept has led to an endless stream of remakes, movies based on successful concepts from other media, and an almost complete absence of films with complex stories that don't rely on things that blow up.

The elevator pitch has become an overworked shortcut to critical thinking. Entrepreneurs frame their business ideas on how well they can turn them into elevator pitches, not whether they really represent a unique opportunity. By definition, a 60- to 90-second pitch can't convey a complex idea or a truly disruptive innovation. That's one reason why we get endless clones of ideas such as location-based check-in services, or personal financial services, or any number of other businesses.

As Lon Chow, a partner with Apex Venture Partners in Chicago, pointed out in an article I recently wrote on angel investors in Chicago, he sees far too many entrepreneurs who say that they're going to be the "X of Y", where X is Google, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com, eBay, Groupon, or another successful business. Analogies are simple to create, present and understand, but they can be dangerous. This kind of analogy lends itself to an elevator pitch but indicates that the person making the pitch hasn't thought through their idea well enough.

Here's a practical example: Every year (and for a few years, twice a year), the DEMO Conference has featured a hand-picked list of startups. The key requirement for consideration is that this must be the first public demonstration of any product or service to be displayed at DEMO. Each company only has six minutes to present its product or service on stage. After all the pitches are made, the conference organizers and audience vote on the best presentations--these are what they call the DEMOgods. Some of the companies that have won the DEMOgod award include:

DoDots

uTOK

Zaplet

e-tractions

Groxis

Speechi

FourSticks

YackPack

UniPrivacy

Have you heard of any of them? Very few of the companies that didn't already have products before they came to DEMO and won DEMOgod awards are still around. You won't find any of the companies that we consider "superstars": Google, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com, etc., on the list. I was there for the DEMO presentation that almost everyone refers to as legendary: The launch of the original Palm Pilot, in 1996. That was 14 years ago.

The process of developing an elevator pitch can be very helpful for honing marketing messages and cutting away unnecessary clutter, but big ideas can't, and shouldn't, be reduced to elevator pitches. In fact, if an idea can easily be reduced to an elevator pitch, if you can easily explain it in a couple of sentences, it's likely either trivial or can easily be duplicated by others.

Smart investors spend much more time examining the people in a startup than they do the elevator pitch. There's always value in a concise message, but if you haven't thoroughly thought out all of the issues behind those first 60 seconds, sooner or later your investors will figure that out. At best, the elevator pitch is a way to open the door; at worst, a bad elevator pitch can close the door before you ever get a chance to open it. If your idea doesn't lend itself to an elevator pitch, pursue the idea, not the elevator pitch.

Friday, December 10, 2010

I've decided to put the Feldman File videoblog on hiatus. Viewership increased nicely for the first three episodes, but it dropped for the most recent two; this week's episode has only had 14 views so far. Clearly, the content and production style aren't finding an audience, so I'm going to consider some other approaches, including a conventional audio podcast. For those of you who watched my videoblog, thank you! I hope to come up with something that's still informative but is more entertaining.

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Google and Facebook are physically located fairly close to each other, in Mountain View and Palo Alto, California respectively, but they do very different things: Google is primarily a search engine, and Facebook is a social networking site. Dig beneath the surface, however, and you'll find that the two companies are actually very similar: Both of them sell your personal information in order to make money.

Google uses your search queries to feed you targeted advertising. If you use Gmail, Google displays ads based on the subject and contents of your emails. It targets ads to you on YouTube based on what you watch. If you use a Google location service, such as Google Maps, it points you to advertisers in your area. Google claims that it doesn't warehouse or mine the information that you give it, but it sucks up enormous amounts of data, and it's nonsensical to believe that Google isn't correlating that information.

Facebook, on the other hand, gets you to give it as much personal information as it can so that it can send you targeted advertising. The company also sells your information to its partners so that they can send you advertising and target their sales messages to you. Facebook correlates the information that users provide with that of their friends to build a comprehensive demographic and psychographic profile of each user. Most of Facebook's "initiatives" over the years have been attempts to convince its users to give it more of their personal information, changes in policies to make more of that information public, or programs for monetizing that information.

Whenever either company introduces a new product or service, it's important to ask: How it will generate more salable information or offer more opportunities to monetize that information? At their core, that's what Google and Facebook are all about.

Google repeatedly said that Chrome OS is perfect for netbooks, and the company has been running it on its own prototype netbooks in-house. Acer and Samsung have committed to ship netbooks with Chrome OS some time in mid-2011. However, netbook sales have slowed as the iPad has gained popularity, and a flood of new tablets next year will drive netbook sales even lower.

So, will Chrome OS work on tablets? The Chrome OS team was asked about it in the Q&A session and sidestepped the question. Google didn't show any tablets running Chrome OS, and it didn't demonstrate any multitouch features. Android appears to be Google's tablet solution. If the market is moving away from netbooks and toward tablets, and Android is Google's tablet platform, why is Google putting resources into Chrome OS?

The answer was surprising. Google's Eric Schmidt said that Chrome OS is, in fact, the first commercially-acceptable implementation of the thin client architecture that Sun tried to sell years ago. Really? The reason for thin clients was that personal computers cost a lot of money and were difficult to maintain in a corporate IT architecture. Today, PCs are dirt cheap (cheaper than thin clients were "back in the day"), and it's far easier for IT departments to maintain their networks of computers.

So, does this mean that Chrome OS is being built for a platform (netbooks) that's rapidly becoming obsolete, and for an application (thin clients) that's already obsolete? Is anyone from the Android team talking with the Chrome OS team? Are they even in the same company? In short, is there anyone in charge at Google?

The declines in advertising revenue were to be expected, given that print circulation has been declining for years, but the newspapers are caught in a vicious circle: As circulation declines, circulation revenue falls, and the reduced circulation causes advertising revenue to decline. After two years of online advertising revenue declines, revenue increased for newspapers in all three quarters of this year so far, but total online revenues in Q3 were less than 14% of print revenues--far less than that needed to offset the print declines.

Most newspapers are going to have to jump to an online-only strategy sooner or later, but how far can they ride their print businesses before they have no choice but to make the transition? Further, can they afford to offer a meaningful newsgathering and editorial service on their online revenues alone?

That reply, along with other things that Rubin said, strongly suggest that Honeycomb, not Gingerbread, will be the first "officially sanctioned" version of Android for tablets. Given how long it takes Google's carrier and hardware partners to roll out new versions of Android, that means that we're unlikely to see tablets with Google's full endorsement until mid-2011 at the earliest. By "full support", I mean support of and permission to distribute all of Google's apps, access to the Android Marketplace, and a solid library of third-party apps designed to take advantage of the tablet's screen size. There may be tablets with pre-Gingerbread versions of Android that get "special dispensations" from Google, as Samsung's Galaxy Tab did, but no wide selection of fully-supported Android tablets before Honeycomb.

There will undoubtedly be plenty of tablet prototypes running Gingerbread at the Consumer Electronics Show next month, but it's almost certain that Apple will ship its second generation of tablets before the first Honeycomb tablets ship.

Critics of the Google/Groupon deal say that it's easy to create a "daily deals" service, and in fact, there are dozens of them in the U.S. alone. The technical barriers to entry are very low. The same was true in the 90s, when eBay became the dominant Internet auction site. There were dozens of other auction sites, some of which focused on vertical niches, and others that took eBay head-on. However, eBay became dominant because it took advantage of network effects, where the value of a product or service increases as the number of people using it increases. (Bob Metcalfe argued that the value is roughly the square of the number of users.)

In eBay's case, as more people used the service and more people posted products for sale, it generated a "virtuous circle" that made it more popular and gave users ever fewer reasons for using other auction sites. Groupon, however, is a different animal. Most Groupon users don't go to the site to find deals; instead, they get daily deals via email. Groupon's value comes in cornering the market for daily deals, and there are simply too many retailers out there for that to happen. Even Groupon realizes that it can't add enough salespeople to grow its business fast enough, so it's implementing a service that enables merchants to post their own deals.

Groupon may get to the point where consumers no longer pay attention to other daily deals and merchants no longer bother to post deals with other services, but it's not there yet and may never get there. That doesn't mean that Groupon won't continue to grow and won't be successful enough to eventually IPO, but it does mean that the "low barriers to entry" argument is credible. It's far too early to say whether Google dodged a bullet or Groupon made a brilliant decision, but either way, Groupon is no eBay.

Flash Player 10.2 is the first public implementation of Adobe's Stage Video architecture, which makes better use of whatever video acceleration (usually in the GPU) is available in the user's computer. Adobe claims that Stage Video decreases CPU usage by up to 85%. As a practical matter, Flash videos are playing cleanly, without stuttering or dropouts, on Windows using Flash Player 10.2 in both Firefox and IE. Windows 7/IE 9 users will also benefit from graphic acceleration using any available hardware rendering capabilities. If you're using Flash Player 10.1 or earlier and you don't need to continue using it for development purposes, I strongly recommend uninstalling 10.1 and replacing it with 10.2.

A couple of weeks ago, Jim Jannard of RED announced that the Scarlet would henceforth be called the EPIC Light, with new specifications and pricing to be announced. That set off a flurry of speculation about the new camera. The same thing is happening with Apple's Final Cut Suite, for the opposite reason--a lack of news beyond a couple of cryptic emails from Steve Jobs. There's also a lot of speculation about unannounced EVIL (electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lenses) cameras from Canon and Nikon, complete with "leaks" from unnamed sources.

You can easily find (unintentionally) funny exchanges between people who speculate about the unannounced features and delivery dates of these and many other products. It's like people looking at the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave and debating what and who they are.

It's human nature to speculate, and I've certainly done lots of it, but at the end of the day, it's wasted time and effort. RED, Apple, Canon, Nikon, etc. will release the details of their products when they're ready, and if there's one thing I've learned after years in the technology business, it's that nothing is fixed in stone until you can actually order the product. So relax. It's fun to guess, but it's better to know.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Last June, Adobe announced that it would begin beta testing a Mac version of its Audition digital audio workstation software late this year. I've used Audition on Windows since the late 1990s, when it was called Cool Edit Pro and was published by a company called Syntrillium. Audition became a favored audio editing tool for radio broadcasters and podcasters, but Adobe hasn't updated the software since 2007. I wondered why Adobe was bothering to release a Mac version of an application that had been bypassed by Avid's Pro Tools, Apple's Logic, and many other DAWs.

A few weeks ago, Adobe released the first beta version of Audition for the Mac, and even in beta, it's an excellent piece of software. It follows the user interface design of Audition 3.0 for Windows fairly closely, but takes advantage of OSX's multitouch capabilities. Many of the effects have been improved--for example, the noise reduction processor is both easier to use and much more effective than its Windows predecessor.

So, I take back the snarky remarks I made about Adobe porting obsolete software to the Mac. However, it doesn't change the fact that the Windows version is still three years old, hasn't had even a minor point update since early 2008, and desperately needs an upgrade.